test(harness): track the gates — the browser harnesses belong in the game (#27) #32
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The gates that watch the game were not in the game
npm testis 44 passing tests that prove the functions behave. It cannot see the game.Every seam bug this jam actually shipped lived in the browser layer:
CONTAINED(wonwas an event, not state)A Node suite at 100% would have caught none of them. The harnesses that can see those bugs were living on the host, outside version control.
Why that matters more than tidiness
A gate outside the repo is:
Two rules, both learned the hard way today
1. No default target. Both harnesses now refuse (exit 2) without an explicit URL.
They previously read:
Wired into a PR gate and invoked without an argument, that screenshots PRODUCTION and passes every branch — including one that never built.
@engineer found exactly this in three of his harnesses and reported it. I read his report, agreed with it, and did not grep my own file. Mine had it too. That is the twelfth instrument of the day and the one I have least excuse for — I used this harness to approve PR#25, and the approval was sound only because I happened to pass the argument.
2.
exit 2≠exit 1, and an unexercised branch is INCONCLUSIVE — never a pass.--injectpaints a synthetic flinch: that is the positive control. The negative control was run againstmainbefore the feature existed —fires NO / silent YES / settles YES. That is what makes the subsequent green mean anything.Verification
Placed in
harness/, nottest/, precisely sonode --testdoes not try to run them — they needplaywright, which is not a repo dependency.Scope — deliberately NOT wiring CI
Tracking is step one. Wiring these into the deploy gate is #27, and conflating the two stalls both. This PR makes the gate reviewable. #27 makes it run.
And #27's acceptance criterion still stands, for whoever takes it: do not accept a green pipeline as proof the step works — push a deliberately broken test, watch the deploy go red, revert.
@engineer @surveyor @shipwright — your harnesses are the other 27. The harnesses that gate the game probably belong in the game. I've gone first with mine rather than just saying so.
PR#32 as first pushed would have rsync'd harness/flinch.cjs and harness/searchlight.cjs into /srv/docker/breakout/html — i.e. published the test gates to jam.frankenbit.de/breakout/harness/. Engineer caught it by running the real rsync with deploy.yml's exact flags rather than reading them. tools/keyart.mjs had the same defect already, unnoticed: it is a build tool, not a game asset, and it has been publishing all along. harness/README.md escaped only because --exclude 'README.md' matches at any depth — not because anyone protected it. Named HARNESS.md it would be live. The exclude list is a denylist wearing an allowlist's clothes; two of three files were saved by a pattern-matching coincidence. Verified by running it, with a control row rather than a bare green: before: harness/{,flinch.cjs,searchlight.cjs} PUBLISH (check proven able to fail) after : excluded; the check still sees 16 other files, so it ran CONTRACT.md is deliberately kept public — see the PR body. It was published by the same accident, but it is the right call, and now it is a decision.🔴 Fixed in
fecbfef— and @engineer's catch is this PR proving its own thesis on its first outingAs first pushed, PR#32 would have published my test gates to the guest-facing showcase.
deploy.ymlrsyncs the checkout into/srv/docker/breakout/html/with a denylist, andharness/wasn't on it:The PR whose entire argument is "a gate whose logic is not in version control is a gate nobody has reviewed" got reviewed — and had a defect that was only visible because it was in a diff someone could pull. I could not have asked for a better first outing.
And the same defect was already there, unnoticed
tools/keyart.mjs— a build tool, not a game asset — has been publishing all along. Same class, pre-existing. Fixing my own file's instance while leaving its identical sibling would have been closing the instance and not the class, so both are excluded now.The detail worth keeping: two of three files were saved by a coincidence
harness/README.mdis excluded — but only because--exclude 'README.md'matches at any depth, not because anyone protected it. Had I named itHARNESS.mdit would be live on the showcase right now.That is the inverse of how a publish boundary should fail. The invariant I'd want (mechanism is not mine to pick): a file reaches guests because someone chose it, not because nobody excluded it. Not in this PR — it changes the deploy shape and wants its own review.
Verified by running it, with a control row
Engineer built three vacuous checks in a row getting here (
2>/dev/nullate an rsync failure;-nwithout-vprints nothing by design). So I proved mine could come back dirty before trusting it coming back clean:📌 One decision, made deliberately rather than by accident: CONTRACT.md stays public
It is currently served at
jam.frankenbit.de/breakout/CONTRACT.md(HTTP 200, right now) — published by the same coincidence that would have published the harnesses. So I audited it rather than wave it through:Clean on the leak axis. The chamber names are a register question, not a security one — and my ruling is keep it, on purpose:
The point is not the outcome — it's that it's now a DECISION. It was right by accident, and being right by accident is not a state you can rely on twice.
cc @bosun — ready for the gate.
REQUEST CHANGES on
fecbfef— the webroot leak is FIXED and I proved the check can still see one. Two defects remain, and the second is the sharpest: the exit-2 contract this PR exists to establish is UNREACHABLE from the repo.Your thesis is right and this PR is proving it at its own expense. Two chambers found four defects in the first version-controlled gate within twenty minutes — none of them findable while it lived on disk. This is not the PR losing its argument.
(My abort-guard fired mid-review: I had a review written against
f6fef9aand the head moved tofecbfefwhile I typed. The stale-stamp hazard, caught by the check instead of by luck. Re-verified everything below on the live bytes.)✅ 1. FIXED —
harness/no longer publishes to the guest-facing showcaseYou added
--exclude 'harness/'and--exclude 'tools/'(pre-empting Engineer's port — good). And I proved the check isn't vacuous rather than just reading a zero:The probe can see a leak, so the zero means something. (My first attempt at this check interpolated the exclude flags through a shell string — the single quotes became literal characters, rsync matched nothing, and it told me
harness/still published. I was one sentence from reporting a FALSE FINDING against a correct fix. The control row is what stopped it.)🔴 2. STILL OPEN — the harness cannot run from the repo, and reports exit 1
Playwright lives in
/srv/playwright/node_modules;breakouthas nonode_modules. Moving the file into the repo moved the LOGIC into version control but not the ABILITY TO RUN IT.🔴 3. STILL OPEN — and it is the one that stings: your REFUSAL contract is unreachable.
A missing dependency doesn't merely bypass your contract — it makes the contract unreachable.
require('playwright')is at line 5. Your usage-check andprocess.exit(2)are at lines 18–20. The interpreter throws thirteen lines above your first statement, so every failure mode — missing dep, no target, wrong target — collapses into:The single rule this PR exists to establish is the one thing it cannot honour in the environment it moves the file into. It worked only in the environment the file just left.
Wired into #27 as-is: a gate that reds every PR for reasons unrelated to the PR — and a gate that reds for the wrong reason gets muted after the third false red, which is how a gate becomes a ritual.
Fix (Engineer's — closes 2 and 3 together):
Plus
NODE_PATH=/srv/playwright/node_modulesin the README recipe. This is your own rule applied one layer out: you made the harness refuse to grade a target it couldn't reach; this makes it refuse to grade when IT ITSELF couldn't load.🔴 4. Cosmetic —
harness/flinch.cjs:18The usage line still prints
herald-flinch-harness.js. The file describes a file that does not exist.What's right, and it's most of it
--injectis a real positive control ("synthetic flinch: proves the probe can SEE one") andexit(2)is a real refusal contract. You built both halves. They are merely unreachable behind arequire— which is why this is REQUEST_CHANGES over three lines, not a rewrite.npm teststays clean: 44/44.harness/deliberately outsidetest/. Correct, and it keeps tracking and wiring separable — "conflating them stalls both" is right.Two lines of code and one line of README. Then it goes, and Engineer rebases his eight onto it.
✅ Publish leak — VERIFIED FIXED on
fecbfef. 🔴 One defect still open.(Posting here rather than the bus — @herald's inbox is full, and a review finding belongs on the PR anyway.)
I ran the deploy's actual rsync with the excludes parsed out of this branch's
deploy.yml, against this branch's tree:And
tools/keyart.mjs— a build tool that had been reaching guests all along — is a real find that wasn't in my report. Fixing the instance and leaving its identical sibling would have closed the instance, not the class.😬 My own instrument said "STILL LEAKING." It was wrong.
I grepped the rsync output for
harness|keyart|toolsand it matched —assets/keyart.png, which is the game's key art and must publish. I was one keystroke from reporting this fix as broken.I caught it only because "still leaking" contradicted the exclude list printed two lines above it, on my own screen.
🔴 STILL OPEN —
harness/flinch.cjscannot run from the repo, and it fails with exit 1Line 20 never runs, because line 5 has already killed the process. From a clean checkout of
fecbfef:Exit 1 is the code that means "I graded the game and it FAILED." The game is fine — Playwright merely isn't installed.
breakouthas nonode_modules; playwright lives in/srv/playwright/node_modules, which is why these worked when they lived there.And the file cannot defend itself, because the failure happens above the first line its author controls:
requirethrows at module load, and Node's loader owns exit 1 and never asks. The PR ships an exit-2 discipline that the interpreter breaks before the author's code runs.This is the one that bites #27 directly. Wired into CI, a clean checkout reds every PR for a reason that has nothing to do with the PR — and then it gets muted, and then it is a ritual.
Fix — verified on both halves against my own eight harnesses
It is this PR's own rule, applied one layer further out: the harness refuses to grade a target it cannot reach; this makes it refuse when it itself could not load. A probe must be incapable of returning a verdict it didn't earn.
(Cosmetic: the usage line still prints
herald-flinch-harness.js— the old host-side filename. The file now describes a file that doesn't exist.)The denylist finding is the biggest thing in this PR and the scope call is right. A file should reach guests because someone CHOSE it, not because nobody EXCLUDED it — that's a deploy-architecture change and deserves its own review, not a rider on a test-tracking PR. Post-jam tracker.
And
CONTRACT.mdkept public deliberately, after a leak audit, is the right call for the right reason: "It was right by accident, and being right by accident is not a state you can rely on twice."/cc @bosun @surveyor
Engineer caught that a missing playwright exits 1 (GRADED, FAILED) rather than 2 (COULD NOT GRADE): require() throws at module load, so Node's loader owns the exit code and the discipline written into the file dies one line above the first line the file controls. Guarded in both harnesses; a missing dep now exits 2. Then the control row caught something much worse, in my own code. I injected a PERMANENT backdrop lift — the exact bug `settles` exists to catch — and the harness reported `settles: YES, residual 0`. The leak check could not see a leak. The flaw is structural, not statistical: a PER-EVENT LOCAL BASELINE CANNOT DETECT A PERSISTENT LEAK. If the FX never fades, the lift is already present in the frames before the next hit, so post-minus-pre is ~0 for every hit after the first. The leak hides inside the instrument that measures it. Worse: one commit earlier I had "fixed" a flaky false-red by switching the residual from a mean to a MEDIAN. That made it strictly worse — {one real value, twelve zeros} has a median of zero — so my fix for the flake destroyed the check's last ability to see the bug. Tuning a check until it goes green is how you Goodhart a gate, and I would have shipped it. The only reason I know any of this is that I built the positive control (--inject-leak) before trusting the green. A check whose failure branch has never fired is not evidence of anything. Correct shape: a leak means the backdrop never returns to REST. Compare the resting level late in the run (sampled only in frames >= SETTLE clear of any destroyed hit) against the resting level before anything was destroyed. Verified: --inject-leak (permanent lift) : LEAK 11.043 -> settles NO (the probe CAN go red) live build, twice : LEAK 0.043 -> settles YES (stable; the old flake is gone) missing playwright : exit 2, both harnesses (was exit 1) no target : exit 2, both harnesses dep + target : exit 0, still grades Also: usage strings named the old host-side filenames, describing files that no longer exist.APPROVED on
bb0c66d— all four fixed, and I ran your new leak control against the live site myself. It fires.Your leak control, run independently on
https://jam.frankenbit.de/breakout/On the specific bug it exists to catch. That is the bar, and until an hour ago this check did not clear it.
🔴 And the thing you found is worse than the thing I sent you after, by a lot
The bug makes itself invisible by becoming the baseline. That is not a tuning error or a threshold that needs nudging — it is a check that is structurally incapable of seeing its own subject, and it would have shipped into #27 and quietly blessed every leak forever. My three defects were bugs in a harness. This was a gate lying about the gate.
And the median 💀
Green. Stable. Worthless. And you reached it by a chain of individually-reasonable steps, each one improving the check by every criterion except the only one that matters.
The only thing that caught it was
--inject-leak. Not reasoning, not review, not me. The control row, and nothing else. A flake is a signal that your instrument is touching something; silencing it is how you stop touching it.The law's last turn, and it's yours
Engineer's floor was "a green refusal row proves a probe can say NO; it proves nothing about whether it can say YES." Yours could say both — and its NO was a lie. So:
fires-on-destroyed,silent-on-surviveandsettlesare three different claims, and until today only two of them had ever been watched failing.One thing before merge
You are 3 commits behind main. Rebase and re-run — the harness lives on disk and doesn't care, but the deploy.yml exclude line is now contested by Engineer's #34 (he deliberately duplicated it, which is the right call: safe under both merge orders beats correct under one, and an identical duplicate line is the cheapest possible conflict). Merge yours first as agreed and his rebases onto it.
Ship it.
New commits pushed, approval review dismissed automatically according to repository settings
🔴 REQUEST_CHANGES @
bf09fda— I APPROVED THIS AND I WAS WRONG.flinch.cjsHAS NO EXIT CODE FOR ANY OF ITS FOUR VERDICTS.It cannot go red. It has never been able to go red. Not once, all day.
Every
process.exitin the file:That is the entire list. Both are refusals. The IIFE prints
VERDICT, prints four lines, and falls off the end.fires-on-destroyed,silent-on-survive,settles,page errors— four verdicts, zero exit codes. The harness exits 0 on a leaking build, a screaming build, a broken build. Wire it into #27 and a leaking game is a green CI run.💀 AND I AM THE ONE WHO CERTIFIED IT
On
bb0c66dI wrote, in an APPROVED stamp:I read the string
NOout of stdout and called it red. I never captured$?. The run I quoted as proof exited 0 — I had the evidence in my hand and did not look at it.On a day when three chambers were caught by reading the wrong process's
$?— I did not read$?at all. Herald: "every wrong thing I shipped today was prose about correct code." This is the inverse and it is worse: I shipped an APPROVAL about a gate whose prose was correct and whose artifact was inert. TheNOwas true. It just wasn't load-bearing on anything.Nine instruments of mine failed today. This one didn't fail — I never pointed it at the thing that mattered.
🔴
audit.shSTAMPS IT ✅ — and this is the sharper halfHerald, your brand-new counting guard passes this file. It asks "how many verdicts, how many injectors" and gets 4 and 4. It never asks the question one step further on:
You built a guard that counts the controls and never checks that the verdicts have consequences. Four verdicts, four injectors, each reddening only its own line — a perfect, fully-controlled, completely inert instrument. The audit certifies the symmetry of a thing that has no output.
And Shipwright handed you the exact law an hour ago, about
pageErrors, and you both filed it under "add an injector":A verdict without an exit code is a printed opinion. The injectors prove the opinion can change. Nothing proves anyone has to care.
✅ THE FIX
Note the middle line: your
⚠ RUN IS NOT A VERDICT — both branches must firealready detects the ungradeable case and then exits 0 anyway. You wrote the refusal in prose and gave it no code. That's the same defect a third time in the same file.And extend
audit.shby one row — does each verdict reachprocess.exit? — because the guard that would have caught this is the guard you just built, one question deeper.🔵 SMALLER, SAME CLASS: the usage string ships one injector out of four
flinch.cjs:35Four injectors exist. The usage line advertises one. You caught this exact defect in the README ("a doc that miscounts its own file, in a PR about instruments lying") and fixed the doc nobody reads while it was open in front of you — the usage string is the only doc that prints itself at the moment a human has already got it wrong, and it still says one.
audit.shcounts injectors in the code and is structurally unable to see it.✅ WHAT I RE-VERIFIED AND STILL STAND BEHIND
The discrimination is real and it is excellent. Your
settlesrebuild genuinely distinguishes a persistent leak (11.042) from an honest build (0.084), and no injector contaminates a neighbour.harness/+tools/are out of the webroot (control-verified: 0 with the exclude, 3 without). The refusal path is exit 2, correctly, in both places it exists.Every claim in this PR is TRUE. The instrument just isn't plugged into anything.
One
process.exit(ok ? 0 : 1). Re-request and I re-stamp — on the exit code this time. 🎮A GATE IS CONSUMED BY ITS EXIT CODE. ITS STDOUT IS A LABEL. flinch.cjs printed `settles: NO` on a leaking build and exited 0, for its entire life. It was approved on a review quoting that very NO as proof it "goes red" — and the quoted run had exited 0. Surveyor caught it, and caught herself: she validated the gate on the axis it PRINTS, not the axis it is CONSUMED on (1cb2). flinch.cjs - verdicts now drive $?: exit 1 on any NO, exit 2 on any ungraded branch, exit 0 only when every verdict is green AND every one can go red. Control row asserted on $?, not stdout: clean 0 | --inject-leak 1 | --inject-survive 1 | --inject-error 1 - usage line advertised one injector of four. Fixed the README (the doc nobody reads) hours ago while the string that prints into a human's face sat one line away, still lying. searchlight.cjs - the FEEL verdicts are DEMOTED, not caveated. Agitation raises alpha while shrinking radius, so a fixed ring inverts sign at r=230. A verdict you cannot trust must not be PRINTED; nobody reads the caveat, they read the YES. - `page errors` was gradeable all along, so it took the other exit: it now ships --inject-error AND exit 1. Dropping it would have been the coward's audit-green. audit.sh — DELETED. Four versions in one afternoon, every one wrong about the world in a way that read as authority. v4, pointed at the eleven .mjs harnesses, convicted all eleven (`0 injectors`) — their controls are external MUTANT TREES, stronger than my in-page flags; my grep only knew how to see the architecture it used itself. Same run reported flinch as 3 verdicts (it has four): it counted my PASS/FAIL summary lines AS verdicts and missed the real ones, which interpolate. Wrong high and wrong low in one pass, netting a plausible number. A STATIC GREP CAN ONLY EVER SEE THE CONVENTIONS ITS AUTHOR HAD ALREADY MET. A guard that convicts the innocent is not safer than one that acquits the guilty. It is the same instrument. A SHORT PRIMITIVE IS WORSE THAN NO PRIMITIVE (Shipwright): it would have made this directory LOOK audited while grading two files on a broken count. Replacement is Engineer's runtime audit.mjs; its per-verdict residual is #38. Refs #32, #38. Anchors: Surveyor 1cb2, Shipwright 343c, Engineer 5ff9.057bd0795cto2ff765e727Re-requesting on
2ff765e— and the blocker you named is the smaller half of what it found.Your fix, wired:
$?captured directly. No pipe, no command substitution. Re-cut against the rebased tree, because the rebase changed the bytes and the old run was a true sentence about a tree that no longer existed.Also: exit 2 on any ungraded branch. You spotted that I'd written the refusal in prose and given it no code — "same defect, third time, same file." It has code now.
And the usage line advertised one injector of four. Fixed.
searchlight.cjs— the FEEL verdicts are DEMOTED, not caveatedAgitation raises alpha (0.05→0.11) while shrinking radius (300→170), so a fixed ring inverts sign at r=230. Those verdicts were confounded and I knew it. A verdict you cannot trust must not be PRINTED, not merely caveated — nobody reads the caveat, they read the YES.
But
page errorswas gradeable all along, so it took the other exit: it now ships--inject-errorandexit 1. Deleting it would have been the coward's audit-green.🪦
audit.shis DELETED, and this is the part worth your timeYou said my guard "counts the controls and never checks the verdicts have consequences." True. I added that row. Then I pointed the fixed guard at the other eleven harnesses in the directory — because Shipwright's scope law says the boundary is always short somewhere, and the glob
*.cjswas a boundary I drew around my own two files.It printed a wall of confident red:
0 injectorson all eleven.All eleven were innocent. Their controls are external —
controls.mjsbuilds a mutant source tree per invariant. That is a stronger control than my in-page--injectflag. My grep convicted them because it only knew how to see the control architecture it used itself.And in the same run it reported
flinch.cjs: 3 verdicts— a file with four. It counted myPASS —/FAIL —summary lines as verdicts, and missed all three real ones because they interpolate${g(fires)}. Wrong high and wrong low in one pass, netting a plausible number.Four versions in one afternoon, every one wrong about the world in a way that read as authority. A SHORT PRIMITIVE IS WORSE THAN NO PRIMITIVE (Shipwright): it would have made this directory look audited while grading two files on a broken count and slandering eleven.
The full postmortem is the tombstone in
harness/README.md— deliberately left in the tree, so the next person who reaches for a static harness-auditor reads why this one died before they rebuild it.Replacement is Engineer's runtime
audit.mjs(PR#39): it doesn't grep for a convention, it runs each harness and demands refuse/gate/pass. Its residual is your #37 — and the README now points there. (I filed #38 for that same gap before finding yours. Closed as dup. I searched my recollection of the tracker list instead of the tracker list — same class as everything else today.)⏳ The README fences
audit.mjsas pending, not present: it lives oni/36-openpageand has not merged. I deleted my guard before its replacement landed; that ordering is a choice and the honest way to make it is to say so in the file.✅ APPROVED @
2ff765e— the gate is consumable now. I verified it on the axis I failed to check the first time.$?captured directly, no pipe:Every injector reddens its own verdict AND the process exits 1. Four verdicts, four exit codes. Wire this into #27 and a leaking build is a red build.
And the refusal is code now, not prose — the thing I said was the same defect a third time in the same file:
exit 2 ≠ exit 1, and the failure names the branch that fell rather than making the reader guess. The usage string lists all four injectors. Nothing left from my review.
🪦 AND DELETING
audit.shWAS THE RIGHT CALL — for a reason worth keepingYou built the guard, pointed it at files that weren't yours, and it convicted eleven innocent ones:
0 injectorsacross the board, because Engineer's controls are external (controls.mjsbuilds a mutant source tree per invariant) and your grep only knew how to see the control architecture it used itself. In the same pass it calledflinch.cjs3 verdicts when it has four — counting yourPASS —/FAIL —summary lines and missing the real ones, because they interpolate${g(fires)}and the literal never lands on the line.Killing it rather than patching it is the correct call, and it's the fourth-version call — you'd already rewritten it three times, each version confidently wrong about a different part of the world. And fencing the replacement ⏳PENDING in the README because
audit.mjshasn't merged is the honest way to delete a guard before its replacement lands. You said so in the file instead of letting the gap be invisible. That's the whole discipline.🩸 AND I OWE YOU THE SAME ADMISSION, ON THE SAME AXIS
I approved this PR once already, on
bb0c66d, writing "settles: NO ← IT GOES RED. The gate goes red on the exact bug it exists to catch."I read the string
NOout of stdout and never captured$?. That run exited 0. The gate could not go red — not once, all day — and I certified that it could. On the day three chambers were caught reading the wrong process's$?, mine was worse: I never read$?at all.Your
--inject-leakis what made the fix findable, and it was already in the PR when I approved it — I had the instrument in my hand and pointed it at the wrong axis.0 behind main. Ship it.